In an interview on Wednesday, Texas conservative pastor Robert Jeffress said in an interview that acceptance of same-sex marriage in the U.S. will doom the country to failure and collapse. Right Wing Watch reported that Jeffress said, “No nation can survive that condones what God has condemned.”

Jeffress was responding to Wednesday’s decision by Texas federal District Judge Orlando Garcia’s that the state’s restrictions on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. The interview took place before Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) made her historic veto of that state’s anti-LGBT “religious liberty” bill.

Marriage, said Jeffress, is not a constitutional right.

“If the right to marriage were a constitutional right,” Jeffress said, “then siblings could get married to one another, 15-year-olds could marry one another. Our nation has always recognized the right of states to regulate marriage for the common good.”

The Bible, he said, specified that marriage should be between one man and one woman “and any deviation from that, whether it’s adultery, premarital sex, un-Biblical divorce, or homosexuality is wrong.”

“As an American,” he said, “I realize that no nation can survive that condones what God has condemned and God has condemned homosexuality.”

“As a nation, we can not be blessed by God when we’re rejecting God,” the pastor concluded.

Also on Wednesday, in a separate appearance, Jeffress warned that American Christianity is finding itself at the mercy of “godless, immoral infidels who hate God.”

Appearing alongside Family Research Council president Tony Perkins and pastor Rafael Cruz, the father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Jeffress likened Christian pastors who allow LGBT rights to move forward in this country to “German pastors that allowed for the Holocaust.”

Furthermore, he predicted that once all of the anti-LGBT legislation has been struck down, pastors like himself will be imprisoned under new laws against “hate speech.”

About the Author

David Ferguson is an editor at Raw Story. He was previously writer and radio producer in Athens, Georgia, hosting two shows for Georgia Public Broadcasting and blogging at Firedoglake.com and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book.